Hold my hand (hold my hand)
It's a long way down
Long way down
Hold my hand (hold my hand)
Ooh baby, It's a long way down (hold my hand)
Hold my hand (hold my hand)
Ooh baby, It's a long way down (hold my hand)
Hold my hand (hold my hand)
Ooh baby, It's a long way, oh down there
Hold my hand
Ooh baby, It's a long way down, a long way down

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About “Bottom of the River”

This song features on Delta Rae’s first album, Carry The Fire, as a pounding, bluegrass-tinged work song with disturbing themes of persecution by religion. The lyrics illustrate the old, and often dangerous belief that some childhood illnesses were caused by possession by evil spirits or the devil, while the music video depicts a woman being led away in chains, perhaps evoking the Salem witch trials. After all, one of the tests against witchcraft was to hold the woman underwater. If she didn’t drown, she was a witch.

For the song’s composition, traditional instruments were set aside in favor of a reliance on the six voices that make up the band for beats, snaps, hums, and choruses. The only notable addition outside of the voices is the beat, which is kept by the sound of shaking chains, adding to the work song impression by evoking the rhythms of toiling prisoners or slaves.

“Bottom of the River” became one of Delta Rae’s best-performing and most well-known songs to date.

What have the artists said about the song?

Speaking just before performing the song live on the Cayomo Music Cruise in 2013, vocalist/songwriter Eric Holljes said “It’s a song that I woke up with in my head three years ago and that’s never happened to me before that and its never happened to me since. I woke up with this chorus ‘hold my hand, ooh baby its a long way down to the bottom of the river’ and I ran to my phone at 3am and I recorded it. Then the next day I brought it to my brother Ian and I played it for him and he’s like ‘I think that’s a gospel song’ and I was like ‘that’s what I thought!’…and we went out to the shed at around, I think, 2 AM and we wrote the verses for this song. It sort of just poured out and we wanted to write sort of an Old Testament, Biblical, Gothic story.